Aims

The goals of the project have been to explore, define and articulate the emerging design principles and patterns that underpin the development and delivery of massive open online courses, and to demonstrate them by the application to the design of new MOOCS. The context of the proposal is multidimensional in that it will incorporate input from diverse but complimentary perspectives that will include designers, deliverers, researchers, learners and tutors who are engaged in MOOCS and Open and Distance Learning more broadly.

Background

The rapid rise of massive open online courses as led to a series of different approaches to their delivery, pedagogy, functionalities and support mechanisms. Some have these have been successful and others not so successful – for an example we can see high variability in the documented retention rates across different MOOC offerings.

The primary questions within this proposal are driven by a desire to understand the design processes and mechanisms by which we come to create and deliver open and distance learning at scale and by extension how we can formulate this into sharable design solutions that can be applied by others. Particularly where we are observing differentiation and varying degrees of success in the current landscape as defined by:

Delivery modes and platform choices;

Style of MOOC;

Reported experiences of learners;

Reported experiences of tutors;

Use of motivational schemes such as micro-certification e.g. badging;

Retention and progression figures;

Use of analytics;

The project is deploying the SNaP! (Scenarios, Narratives, and Patterns) methodology implemented in the form of Participatory Patterns Workshops (PPW). This will be extended to a hybrid format, where the face-to-face workshops which will be echoed by open online activities.

The expected outputs include a set of design patterns and a prospective pattern language to support the continued development of MOOCs in relation to the particular design challenges this form of ODL presents. The proposal also intends to experiment with the SNaP!/PPW design itself by extending the workshops to include a parallel set of massively open online workshop activities to support extended participation from global experts and practitioners.

Project Team

Lead

Professor Steven Warburton: Head of Department of Technology Enhanced Learning, University of Surrey

Co-investigator

Dr Yishay Mor: Lead on OLD-MOOCS at the Open University, UK

Invited experts core group

Mike Kerrison: Director of Academic Development, University of London International Programmes

Professor Alan Tait: Open University UK

Dr Roger Mills: Research Associate and Senior Member, St. Edmunds College, University of Cambridge